The number of far right terrorists in prison has tripled

The rise comes after last year’s Finsbury Park attack (REX)
The rise comes after last year’s Finsbury Park attack (REX)

The number of far-right terrorists imprisoned in Britain has more than tripled in a year, new statistics have confirmed.

29 people were in custody by the end of March, a rise from nine the previous year.

Although Islamist extremists make up the majority of the 228 people caged for terror offences at 82 percent, they are followed by 13 percent far-right and a further six percent driven by other ideologies.

A Home Office bulletin confirmed: ‘There have been steady increases in recent years in the number of terrorist prisoners across all the types of ideologies covered.

‘The proportion of prisoners holding far-right ideologies has increased steadily over the past three years. ‘

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The number of terror-related arrests has also risen by 17 percent, hitting a record of 441 in the 12 months leading to April 2018 – with large scale police operations as a direct response to the attacks in Finsbury Park, Parsons Green, Manchester Arena and London Bridge.

Scotland Yard has confirmed that 12 terrorist plots and four extreme right-wing attacks were foiled since March 2017, along with 600 active investigations into 3000 high profile suspects.

Darren Osborne was sentenced to at least 43 years after he drove a van into Finsbury Park mosque (Rex)
Darren Osborne was sentenced to at least 43 years after he drove a van into Finsbury Park mosque (Rex)

Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, the head of counter-terror policing in the UK, said: ‘With the terrorist attacks of 2017 we saw a genuine step-change in momentum. As a result, our operational activity increased to meet the new and emerging threats we now face.

‘A year on and our activity continues to be at unprecedented levels; shown, not least, by the fact that, in the past year, working together with the security services we have stopped an average of one terrorist attack every month. Police, together with the security services, are determined to make the UK as hostile an environment for terrorists as possible.’